Set Up a Student Portal

Learn About Student Portals

Students experience Student Success Hub through an Experience Cloud site that you build for them. This site, or portal, is a place where your students manage their appointments, track their tasks, and connect with their success team. Portals meet students where they live: on their phones and devices.

To get you started, Student Success Hub installs a sample unpublished student portal, called Student Success Hub Portal, that you can explore and use for ideas for your own higher ed institution. It's not meant to be used in production without customization.

Note The sample portal doesn't include any student members. To work with the sample portal, add a student profile in the site's Administration workspace. For instructions, see Manage Your Student Portal.

Every student portal is unique, so we'll document the essentials you need to set up a basic, mobile-optimized site using the Salesforce Customer Service template. Then, we'll show you how to build some recommended functionality using some Student Success Hub Lightning components. But ultimately, you and your support staff get to decide how you want to design and build a site that best supports your students' experience with Student Success Hub.

For a comprehensive guide to the many aspects of Experience Cloud sites not covered here, see Set Up and Manage Experience Cloud Sites.

Student Portal Release Information

Student portals have been part of Student Success Hub since the beginning. They need to be updated to add support for new features as those features are released or enhanced. To get your student portal up and running, complete the tasks in this article.

Object and Field Permissions for Student Portals

To make a feature available and functional in the student portal, set permissions for it.

See Configure Student Permissions.

Balance Visibility and Security in the Student Portal

Students need to be able to see data about support staff . There are two main approaches to controlling this visibility. Each approach depends on a combination of sharing settings and membership settings, and each has its own requirements and implications.

Regardless of the approach you choose, first set up your organization-wide default sharing settings and site preferences.

1. From Setup, go to the Sharing Settings page and make sure that Default External Access for the User object is Private. You don't want students to have wide open access to all Users in your org.

   For details on how to configure sharing settings for other objects for portal security, see Student Success Hub Sharing Settings.

2. From the site's Administration workspace, go to the Preferences page and select See other members of this site.

Next, consider the following two approaches.

Approach	What It Does	Requirements and Implications
Create a User sharing rule that shares (read only) Internal User records with Customer Portal Users.	Enables a student to see and schedule with a support staff member on their success team.	How you define the sharing rule (group membership versus criteria, roles versus groups, and so on) depends on how you've defined your Internal and site User role hierarchy. If a support staff member is also a site member, the student can click the staff member's name to see their profile (and schedule an appointment directly from their profile page, if configured). If a staff member is not a site member, the student clicking the staff member's name will encounter a permissions error.
Select Site User Visibility in Sharing Settings.	Enables any site member (as defined in the Members view in the site's Administration workspace) to see any other member.	You must add support staff members as site members—either by profile or permission set. Otherwise they won't be visible to students. Important Students can see support staff as well as other students in the site. This level of visibility typically brings with it the added responsibility of moderating the student portal. Consider this implication carefully if you choose this approach.

Create Your Student Portal

Start creating the site from a Digital Experiences template.

1. From Setup, search for and then select All Sites. (If you don't see this option, enable Digital Experiences first.)
2. Click New.

3. Select one of the templates that supports drag-and-drop components in Experience Builder (look for tiles that show the lightning bolt icon). For example, choose the Customer Service template.

4. Click Get Started.
5. Enter a name and the part of the site's URL that identifies the portal.
6. Click Create.

Add Components to the Site

Now that you've created your site, you're ready to add components in the Experience Builder workspace.

See Student Portal Components to learn how to configure the components that work best for your institution's needs.